Can a phono pre make so much difference to surface noise?

[mhardy6647]

I know not what digitize mean?

This tablet appears to have been extensively digitized.

(image from Wikipedia)



Sorry... sorry!

 

[Petrushka]

This tablet appears to have been extensively digitized.

View attachment 379349
(image from Wikipedia)



Sorry... sorry!

Needs to be defragged.

 

[LewisWaddo]

+1 for the puffin/waxwing it can make VG records sound near mint, and for mono records it can work miracles with its super mono mode. I’ve made incredible needle drops with the optical output also!

 

[LTig]

You can skin this cat with overhead, or with fast recovery. For the event itself the data is already lost, so it’s not necessary to reproduce garbage with exacting fidelity - you just don’t want a lingering ill-effect.

Fast recovery is the preferred way to go. Too much headroom and loud clicks/pops will just clip gain stages in the following chain.

 

[AaronJ]

Fast recovery is the preferred way to go. Too much headroom and loud clicks/pops will just clip gain stages in the following chain.

Can recovery time be observed or measured?

 

[JP]

Fast recovery is the preferred way to go. Too much headroom and loud clicks/pops will just clip gain stages in the following chain.

My preferred, though IIRC, for some topologies that can suffer blocking overhead is likely the way to go.

 

[LTig]

Can recovery time be observed or measured?

Yes. Use a Test Signal with a 1 kHz sinus and add a very short rectangular pulse of lets say 20 dB higher amplitude. Run it through the preamp and capture its Output. Check the length of the pulse and measure time until the sinus is reproduced as expected.

 

[Richard G]

Yes. Use a Test Signal with a 1 kHz sinus and add a very short rectangular pulse of lets say 20 dB higher amplitude. Run it through the preamp and capture its Output. Check the length of the pulse and measure time until the sinus is reproduced as expected.

To make the obvious explicit- Better to know before you buy …

it would be very useful if eg Amir’s (Stereophile’s? lol) measurements included this

 

[AVphile]

The answer to this question is a resounding "YES!" The catch to this answer is that doing so is not cheap.

I am not going to address which phono preamp will best reduce clicks, pops, and surface noise. They don't, nor are they designed to do so. To accomplish that end, two different components are necessary. The first is a machine which can actually clean the record; a lot of that surface noise comes from debris on the record that can be removed. Record cleaning machines capable of accomplishing that typically use ultrasonic energy and cost from $3,000 upwards (although there is one -- HumminGuru -- that is available for around $500). I recommend the DeGritter Mark II, which really works.

However, a record cleaning machine cannot repair physical damage to the record. Those clicks, pops, etc. will still be annoyingly present. The good news is that a couple of serially-successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs started a company, SweetVinyl (www.sweetvinyl.com), to develop a technology to remove them all. Essentially, it digitizes the music, identifies and removes obvious-to-subtle anomalies, and then converts the resultant data stream back to analog. Their technology has been deployed in a line of SugarCube products ranging in price from $2,000 to $4,000.

SugarCubes work astonishingly well. Many of my wife's records from the 1970s and 1980s were in horrific shape and so unlistenable as to be worthless. Using the SC-2 Plus model I have, they sound pristine. In my system, this SC-2 is positioned between my phono preamp and my preamp. When I am playing a record that is in great shape, I simply bypass the SC-2's digital processing circuitry.

I recognize that what I have described is an expenditure of $6,000 to $7,000. This amount of money makes no financial sense unless one either has money to burn (I don't) or has a very large collection of records, of which a goodly number are in poor physical shape (I do). For me, the SC-2 has been a godsend.

For the record (no pun intended), I have no economic interest in SweetVinyl (or DeGritter) nor am I a "shill" for either company. Rather, I am an audiophile and music lover and have written this posting to apprise others of what I did to enable vinyl playback of records filled with click, pops, and surface noise to sound at least as good as does their CD versions played through a good CD player (which I also have).